Orchid report: Six flowers

So we lost one flower from the first stem, but now the second stem has two flowers so now it's a net total of six flowers.

The latest orchid report: five flowers plus more...

OK! So now there are five flowers on the one stem, plus another stem where at least three more buds are about to open and I think the old stem from last year, which is still green, is planning to bud too - that would be cool.

Four flowers ~ orchidtacular

Orchid's progress ~ three flowers and a fourth on the way

Orchid's progress ~ two flowers

There are actually three stems now shooting out of this plant. The one with the two flowers, the one from last year which is still green, but doesn't look like it has any plans to sprout, and a brand new stem which looks like it will have flowers in about a month. Big excitement here at orchid central.

The other stem-like items are aerial roots. Apparently it's perfectly normal for orchids to have them.

My orchid is back!

And ahead of schedule. Last year (technically still this year) my orchid didn't bloom until mid-January. But this year - voila!

Looks like I'll have to get a bigger pot soon.

Christmas time is here

Which means it's time for the music of Vince Guaraldi thanks to his work for "A Charlie Brown Christmas."

Interesting facts about Guaraldi:

• He was a life-long resident of the San Francisco area.
• According to this bio: " In 1971 he became an unofficial member of the Grateful Dead, jamming with them in Bay Area concerts while the group was between permanent keyboardists.
• He is on the back cover of the Grateful Dead's album Aoxomoxoa which was released in 1969.
• However, I can't find any recordings of Guaraldi with the band, which is so frustrating because there are so many recordings of Grateful Dead concerts in 1969 - 1971.
• (I blogged about Janis Joplin sitting in with the Dead back in 2011.)
• He died of a heart attack at age 47 during a gig.

Here is a short documentary about Guaraldi.

The sorry state of rail travel in the United States

To get an idea of how much worse rail travel is between the United States and Europe, consider this: 

There are 334 miles between Montreal and New York City, going almost directly south.

There are 331 miles between Edinburgh and London, going almost directly south.

A mere three miles difference.

But it takes 12 hours to get from Montreal to New York. Amtrak claims 10 hours, but in my experience it takes 12.

It takes 3 and a quarter hours to get from Edinburgh to London.

Even considering that passports must be inspected when crossing the international border between Canada and the United States, that's a ridiculous difference in the amount of time it takes to travel virtually the exact same distance.

It takes over 24 hours to travel from New York to Miami, a distance of 1100 miles. 

It takes 16 hours to travel the same approximately distance between Paris France and Maribor Slovenia, which includes four countries - France, Germany, Austria and Slovenia.

Something needs to be done about train travel in the US.

Yacht Rock featuring Steely Dan ~ how have I never seen this before

I only found out about this Yacht Rock web series via the book Quantum Criminals

Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan which I just got. 

This episode about Steely Dan is hysterical.

Murderbot is WIRED

It's true that there is a Murderbot TV series in the works, but as far as I'm concerned, Martha Wells has only now really hit the big time with this profile in the tech-focused magazine WIRED.

Although one paragraph discusses how famous Wells has not been:

To this day, most people—even in College Station—still don’t know who Martha Wells is. Local newspapers ignore press releases about her latest award. The Barnes and Noble down the street has never invited her to its Star Wars Day, even though she has written a Star Wars novel. She did a signing in town once where nobody showed up.

Wow, that's rough.

This WIRED piece on Wells is the first time I've seen her husband mentioned, so extra points for that. Both Wells and the author of the WIRED article "Murderbot, She Wrote," Meghan Herbst are on Bluesky now and I am following them both. Herbst quickly followed me back, I'm still waiting on Wells.

It is probably pretty obvious through the Murderbot Diaries, but Wells has very cool political views. I've mentioned before that Murderbot is "gloriously woke."

I've written a one-act play and an R-rated fan fiction about Murderbot. I hope one day Wells licenses Murderbot to writers the way the Star Wars franchise has permitted writers, like Wells herself, to write Star Wars books.

Fascism comes to America

I knew the United States was in bad shape when it elected Donald Trump in 2016. 

I began learning French in earnest not long after that election. And now I speak French OK after eight years.

It turns out it's very difficult to emigrate to Canada, even if you're pretty good at French. But I am looking at all possible options for getting out of the United States for the duration of the hideous evil Trump dictatorship.

Hell yeah I voted early for Kamala

Meanwhile Trump is being even more loathsome than ever. I didn't think it was possible for the Orange Freak to be even more grotesque.

This cartoon sums up the Trump campaign, and the stupid cult's worship of a truly evil, rapidly declining old man.

The Roosevelt Island Turkey

Just walking down the street. 

She's been named "Rosie" - I guess for Roosevelt Island? 

Sometimes she hangs out on the lawn next to my apartment building. I've heard her gobbling, early in the morning.

Another silly French animation by moi

Because pourquoi the hell pas? Inspired, sort of, by Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal.

The translation:

Here they grow the flowers of evil.
I don't like them in general.
But if you follow this fine lesson
By giving more hydration
we will have the flowers of good.

Happy Autumn 2024 ~ Sunday, September 22, 2024 at 8:43 AM

"Atlas Shrugged" quiz for Ayn Rand fans

It's been a long time since I wrote on this blog about Ayn Rand and her endless monstrosity, "Atlas Shrugged" but I got into arguments with Rand fans on Facebook recently and put together a quiz for them  - Randroids almost never remember much about AS, if they ever really read it in the first place. 

The quiz gives you a sense of just how illogical Rand was and how much she hated those who did not agree with her "philosophy."

1. When a man inspired by John Galt's endless speech hears a mother tell her child to give away one of his toys, what does he do?

Answer

He slaps her so hard he fractures her jaw.

2. When an old guy in the 20th Century Motor Company's company town finds out that the money he wanted for record albums was given to an 8-year-old girl so she could have braces, what does he do?

Answer

He punches her in the mouth so hard he knocks out all her teeth - it's clear in context that Rand considers this justified - one clue is that the child is described as ugly - almost all villains in Rand's simple-minded tales are ugly.

3. What is Rand's explanation for the existence of Communism?

Answer

Sadism. "And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way (Ivy Starnes) eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who’d just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who’s ever preached the slogan: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’"

4. Who forced the 20th Century Motor Company to collectivize?

Answer

The owners of the 20th Century Motor Company themselves. Because you know, that always happens.

5. When trains from California reach New York City, and they have to dump tons of rotten produce they've been carrying, which river do they dump it in?

Answer

In the East River, which is on the other side of Manhattan from where the train line stops - at the Hudson River. This error is made worse by the fact that Rand was living in Manhattan when she wrote this.

6. How do the book's heroes Dagny and Hank convince local officials to allow their train to barrel through towns at dangerously high speeds?

Answer

Local officials were "outargued, bribed or threatened, to obtain permits to run a train through town zones at a hundred miles an hour."

7. How does Rand deal with people on a train who hold pro-government opinions - including the children of those people?

Answer

She gases them, then blows them up.

8. When all industries in the United States are suffering from railroad failure-induced shortages, and cities are starving, what is the one industry that, inexplicably, manages to function perfectly?

Answer

The florist industry: "It was late afternoon when the florist telephoned her. "Our Chicago office sent word that they were unable to deliver the flowers, Mrs. Rearden, because Mr. Rearden is not aboard the Comet." This is how Rand decides to have Mrs. Rearden find out her husband Hank is having an affair with Dagny Taggart.

Killing Sean Bean is tight

Super easy - barely an inconvenience.

I just found my new favorite thing.

Mes animations françaises

Well the quest to learn French continues - I've been at it seriously since Trump became president, since I rightly guessed he would be a disaster for the United States and there would come a time when I would have to escape to Canada, which is officially bi-lingual.

I still am only about level B2, just maybe on the edge of C1, which is "expert" level. I'm pretty confident in my ability to read and even to write in French. My French speaking ability is OK except when confronted with an actual francophone, and then I become embarrassed about speaking it. 

And as far as understanding when French people talk - I can understand French politicians and other professional speakers pretty well, but regular street French still sounds like a big mush.

But the quest continues and I've taken to creating silly videos as a learning aid.

The first one I created "Les Perroquets" was because I kept mixing up the word "perroquet" - parrot - and "perruque" - wig. And then the goofy story about wig-wearing animals came to me. Voilà.

This next one, "La Pecheuse" I made because I find it funny that "pêche" means to go fishing, as in "J'aime aller à la pêche" - "I like to go fishing," but the word pêche also means "peach." Yes I realize English has weird homonyms too, like "bat" the mammal and "bat" as in baseball bat, but I'm used to those. The French ones still seem funny to me.

Then I switched to writing "comptines" which are French nursery rhymes. The first one, "Pain Perdu" was written in a Covid haze - yes Covid finally got me at last, this past July. So I was thinking about the French term for French Toast, which is not, as some have guessed "le toast francais." 

The French call it "pain perdu" which is pain = bread and perdu = lost. Lost bread. So I came up with three verses on the subject of "pain perdu." 

It's trickier to rhyme in French than you might think, because although a LOT of French words rhyme with each other - in practice, French almost always throws out the last consonant of any given word, which means most of the words end with a vowel sound. 

 On the other hand, the word you want to use may change depending on whether the subject is male or female, for example. 

The main character in these three Pain Perdu verses is a French woman, but in the second verse I wrote "Une jour il va me rendre fou." which means "one day it's going to drive me crazy" (literally "one day he is going to me render crazy.") 

Not only did I get the gender of the word "jour" - day - wrong - it should be UN jour (but the similar word "journee" IS feminine - don't get me started) but since the person speaking is female, it should be "il va me rendre folle" A crazy man is fou. A crazy woman is folle.  But "folle" rhymes with "goal," which does not rhyme with perdu. Oy.

Since my voice was a croaking mess at the time I was making the animation (I was referred to as "sir" by the receptionist when I called to cancel my dentist appointment) I decided to use AI for the voice. And since I hate my voice even when it is not impacted by Covid, I like the results much better. 

Pain Perdue is the first to not feature le chat qui porte une perruque, but the second one to feature outer space. 

The cat in the wig is back in the most recent video, "Les Nouvelles Comptines Pour Les Nuls" (New Nursery Rhymes for Dummies.) The first rhyme is about a tea kettle, only because the word for tea kettle, "bouilloire" is hard for me to say. Like many French words it has too many vowels in a row. Although at least it has consonants. There are two French words I can think of off the top of my head - oie (goose) pronounced "wa" and eau (water) pronounced "oh" that have NO CONSONANTS. 

 And I also confuse bouilloire with two other words -  "brouillard" - fog and "brouiller" - blur.

The second rhyme is because I think it's funny that the French word for kite is "flying deer" - cerf volant.

The third rhyme is because I think it's funny that the French word for "bat" in the mammal sense is "chauve-souris" which literally means "bald mouse." I mean, really? You see a flying mammal and the thing you notice is the condition of its head hair? And I don't think non-flying mice exactly have long flowing locks either.

Also the word for "to smile" in French is "sourir" - which, when you conjugate it for first or second person singular (well present tense, they have a dozen other tenses, don't get me started), is spelt "souris" exactly like the word for mouse. "Une souris qui sourit" means "A mouse who smiles" but even though the word "sourit" in this case is conjugated for third person singular, it sounds the same - so it sounds like "Oon sue-ree key sue-ree." And yes, I spelled it wrong (souri) in my animation. And yes that is a stylized representation of the Moulin Rouge.

Don't even get me started about the confusion between voler meaning to steal and voler meaning to fly. I'm thinking of making another animation about that.

La souris qui sourit et la vache qui rit - ca va me rendre folle.

I created all the music using Garage Band, and hand drew the illustrations in the first two videos, mostly, but used canned images for the second two. And the AI voices were created in murf.ai. I put it altogether in Adobe Premiere Pro, which I am finally getting the hang of - I was pretty happy with the bat. 

The Civil War - but with dogs

Earlier this year I added a post to this blog entitled "The Civil War - but with cats." Well it turns out representing Civil War scenarios with animals is practically a genre. I recently found this image.

Here we see Ulysses S. Grant, represented by a bull-dog type canine challenging Jefferson Davis, represented by what looks like a whippet, wearing a planter's hat, to try to get his supplies, while Jeff only has cotton on his side.

Bienvenue à Equestria ~ My Little Pony in French and English

I am a fan of "My Little Pony" which makes me, what, a "brony?" Or maybe, at my age, a crony?

I was aware, back in 2012, of the unusual My Little Pony fandom of young men between the ages of 15 - 30. I know I was aware because I can see I wrote a blog post about it back then. 

The brony fandom is considered so fascinating that two separate movies were made about them: Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony and A Brony Tale. I've watched both of them.

However, I was so clueless in 2012 that I included in my blog post an image of a "My Little Pony" toy from an earlier generation of the My Little Pony franchise, instead of one from the generation that really captured the brony imagination "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic."

The Friendship is Magic (FIM) animation series includes little knowing asides, which is one of the reasons it is enjoyed by adults. In one episode, called "Too Many Pinkie Pies" there is a reference back to the look of an earlier generation My Little Pony.

A FIM generation pony looks like this:

Animated...

Grace à la langue française

So how did I become a Pony crony? It's because of the French. When the convicted felon Donald Trump was elected POTUS in 2016 I began to learn French with the idea that if I had to ask for political asylum in Montreal (the closest big Canadian city to New York) I would be ready by becoming bi-lingual. And as Trump is threatening to be POTUS again, I still have that escape strategy in mind.

In addition to taking classes at FIAF in 2017 I began to watch cartoons on YouTube that had dubbed French versions. Cartoons because they are mostly aimed at children which means the dialog was slower, clearer and with a smaller vocabulary than anything aimed at adults.

I started with random videos like this one, La chanson des squelettes. Then I graduated to the French version of the British animated series Peppa Pig which is aimed at four-year-olds. When my French got a little better, and I had seen every French episode available of Peppa Pig, I moved on to another British series "Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom" called in French Le Petit Royaume de Ben et Holly, which is for eight-year-olds.

Like all good TV shows for kids since Sesame Street, these shows have humor that parents can appreciate, especially Ben and Holly. Peppa and Ben and Holly were created by the same team.

So finally I had seen all the French version Ben and Holly episodes and was looking around for something else when I hit on My Little Pony: La magie de l'amitié en français. 

At first I watched the episodes strictly for the French, but my French was not good enough to understand all the. dialogue, and I sometimes struggled to understand the plots, so I would watch the English language version of the episode I was struggling with. And then I became interested in the show. There were two episodes in particular that I thought raised the MLP: FIM series to a level above Peppa Pig and Ben and Holly. I will write about them soon.

The people of New York have spoken

TRUMP GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS

You must be joking son, where did you get those shoes?

Let's hear it for the 50th anniversary of the Steely Dan live recording of Pretzel Logic, the title song from the album, May 20, 1974.

(Also performed on that date, a Dan song I just recently heard for the first time: "This All Too Mobile Home.")

One theory is that Pretzel Logic is about time travel:

Steely Dan FAQ author Anthony Robustelli describes "Pretzel Logic" as a bluesy shuffle about time travel.[6] Fagen has stated that the lyrics, including anachronistic references to Napoleon and minstrel shows, are about time travel.[7][6] According to Robustelli, the "platform" referred to in the song's bridge is the time travel machine.[6]

Lyrics

I would love to tour the Southland

In a traveling minstrel show

Yes I'd love to tour the Southland

In a traveling minstrel show

Yes, I'm dying to be a star and make them laugh

Sound just like a record on the phonograph

Those days are gone forever

Over a long time ago, oh yeah 

 

I have never met Napoleon

But I plan to find the time

I have never met Napoleon

But I plan to find the time, yes I do

'Cause he looks so fine upon that hill

They tell me he was lonely, he's lonely still

Those days are gone forever

Over a long time ago, oh yeah 

 

I stepped up on the platform

The man gave me the news

He said, you must be joking son

Where did you get those shoes?

Where did you get those shoes? 

 

Well, I've seen 'em on the TV, the movie show

They say the times are changing but I just don't know

These things are gone forever

Over a long time ago, oh yeah

New flower

My orchid was dropping flowers so I thought that it was going back into its non-flowering state - but then a new flower blossomed. I thought orchids were only supposed to bloom for a few months at most. Now it's been five months since the first blossom.

Speaking of Mae West

In my last blog post I mentioned Mae West. 

The New Yorker magazine recently shared a link to an article which is a reminder that the New Yorker has been around for a long time. A profile of that daring Mae West titled Mae West, the Queen of New York from 1928.

This was right before West went out to Hollywood and never went back to New York. 

And if she hadn't done, we probably would know her name no better than we know the name of Ina Claire, mentioned in the article:

Mae West has little interest in anything outside the theatre. Her reading is confined usually to Variety or any occasional newspaper. She does not even know the names of important theatrical figures unless she has come into direct contact with them. The other night Ina Claire came to see “Diamond Lil.” When Mae West was told she was out front she said, “All right, bring her in. But who is she?”

Although Claire also appeared in films and apparently could be as scandalous as West.

The author of the piece, Thyra Samter Winslow, was pretty prescient:

I have no idea how far Mae West will go, whether she will fade out to “that little place on Long Island” all good vaudeville people long for, or will write, year after year, hokum, melodramas, and sex thrillers to shock the worthies of the town, but I don’t think “Diamond Lil” is her last success.

Clara from Brooklyn

Clara Bow didn't make many talkies, and I've never seen or heard any until I found a copy of a 1929 movie "Dangerous Curves" on YouTube. Bow plays a circus tightrope walker. I knew Bow was from Brooklyn - Prospect Heights (Mae West was also from Brooklyn but Greenpoint) but I did not know how much of a Brooklyn accent she had - or at least had for this role - listen to her say "pah-tik-yah-lee cawfee." 

It was close to her own accent, but she could certainly do the mid-Atlantic accent as can be heard in this clip from "Call Her Savage." 

"This is java - but java."

 

Bow plays another circus performer in "Hoopla," her last film, in 1933, with an accent closer to her own.

What's really interesting about the role is that it would have been perfect for Mae West - Bow plays a wise-cracking vamp who falls for an attractive young man. In fact the role is the Mae West character - West really never played any other kind. Bow's character is even named "Lou" and West played "Lady Lou" in "She Done Him Wrong" also released in 1933. Based on the few films I've seen of either of them, I'd say Bow had greater range as an actor than West, but on the other hand, West wrote many of her own wise-cracks. 

West was almost a decade older than Bow, but West spent her twenties and early thirties in New York theater, producing, directing and starring in plays she wrote herself, and getting arrested for them. 

West didn't get to Hollywood until 1932, at the end of Bow's career and the beginning of the dread "Hays Code" which cracked down on naughtiness in Hollywood. Since all of Bow's movies were pre-Code, she got to show a lot of skin, including at least two films where she is seen skinny-dipping, including Hoopla. If it wasn't for the Hays Code, you know West would have tried to top Bow for who could be the naughtiest.

Shrine of Inari at the BBG

This is my favorite part of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden - the Shrine of Inari with the two fox statues in front. Shrines to Inari invariably have these fox statues - or kitsune, apparently. I know they are messengers of the god but also, they're so cute.

Orchid update ~ eight flowers

This last one appeared a month after the seventh flower.

The Civil War - but with cats

I found this funny graphic at the Library of Congress website recently and then, coincidentally a couple of days later at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

It's called "The Question Settled" and the cat on the right represents the South - or to be exact "Jeff" as in Jefferson Davis, the white cat represents the North as indicated by "Old Abe" on his collar, and the cat on the left has a ribbon labelled "contraband" which is what the enslaved people, rescued from the Confederacy by the Union Army, were called.

This version from the Library Company is in better shape than the one in the Library of Congress, but you can still see spots and stains on the image. I'll have to clean that up with Photoshop one of these days. More about the image here.

Getting Right with Lincoln

Initially I called my play about the friendship between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass THE LINCOLN-DOUGLASS DEBATES but decided to change it to GETTING RIGHT WITH LINCOLN.

The first title was a response to the Republican party's shameful abuse of the memory of Douglass, specifically when a Republican state senator of Virginia, in the early days of the ongoing campaign by the Republican Party to erase Black history, introduced a bill to ban the teaching of "divisive concepts."

He was open, however to the discussion of "history" for example "the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass."

The senator had confused abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass with white senator Stephen Douglas, who famously had a series of debates, primarily about slavery, with Lincoln in 1858. This was after Donald Trump had said “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Which made it sound like Trump believed Douglass was currently alive.

But in the end I decided that too many people might not get the difference between Douglas with one S and Douglass with two Ss and so might assume the play was about the actual Lincoln - Douglas debates. 

The phrase "getting right with Lincoln" is used often by historians, as I came to learn in the year and a half of researching Lincoln and Frederick Douglass before writing the play. The phrase comes from an essay by historian David Donald published in The Atlantic in 1956, although apparently Donald originally got it from a congressman:

 as Congressman Everett Dirksen solemnly assured his Republican colleagues, that these days the first task of a politician is "to get right with...Lincoln."

I decided to use the phrase as a way to describe Frederick Douglass' gradual appreciation of Lincoln and their friendship, which was cut horribly short by Lincoln's assassination.

Also it sounds cooler than my first title, although the phrase has been used by some of the least cool people imaginable, starting with Donald himself. Although he does not explain why he finds it so objectionable that all points on the American political spectrum want to claim Lincoln as an ally - does he not understand how politics works? - he does not hide his contempt for politicians as a whole. And then of course there's the very fashionable misogyny of the time:

the seventeenth annual Lincoln Day dinner of the New York Republican Club, held at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1903. Some five hundred men attended--their wives were segregated in those happy, bygone days-

Even less cool is Charles R. Kesler, who wrote Getting Right with Lincoln: Why Lincoln's Conservative Critics Are Wrong. The article is valuable in that it demonstrates a right-winger admitting the right's hostility towards Lincoln, but a quick Google of his name demonstrates that Kesler is awful. He was a member of the Trump-led Republican Party's scheme to erase Black American history, the "1776 Commission." 

As if that isn't bad enough, Kelser wrote an apologia for Trump after January 6, in which he cites third-rate thinker and professional racist Steve Sailer. 

Nobody except other racists take Sailer seriously, and so I have no doubt Kesler is a racist. Abraham Lincoln does not need an extremist ghoul like that defending his honor.

More recently the phrase was seen as the title of the 2021 book Getting Right with Lincoln: Correcting Misconceptions about Our Greatest President by Edward Steers. It's an exhaustive and exhausting book examining claims about Lincoln's relationships and beliefs. Steers finds no nit too small to pick. It's not a fun read, although I do appreciate its emphasis on the fact that historians, while usually starting out from the same primary sources, often do not agree among themselves.

In a lecture about Frederick Douglass in 2018, historian David Blight used the phrase too:

...there's this old saying about Abraham Lincoln that I think David Donald coined in a 1955 essay, 50-something. And the line is simply "getting right with Lincoln." You know, choosing your Lincoln and getting - using Lincoln for your cause, getting on the side of Lincoln. What would Lincoln think? What would Lincoln have done? We kind of do that with Douglass now to some degree...

Sassy Lincoln

While doing research for my Lincoln play, I found this photo of Lincoln. It seems more dynamic than most of them - he doesn't look so much like his monument here, more like a guy who's about to say something - probably tell a funny story. It almost looks like he's winking but I think more likely his eyelid just drooped like that.

Orchid ~ all seven flowers

Orchid update ~ six

Orchid update ~ five blossoms

Lennon & McCartney

I don't know who took this photo or when it was taken (1962?) but this might be my favorite Lennon-McCartney photo of all time. 

My friend Rosemary took this photo last week in Slovenia.

Orchid update - three blossoms

Closeup

Orchid update

Orchid

My orchid bloomed!

I bought this orchid plant two years ago and it was tiny. When it was delivered it was already blooming.

Last year it did not bloom again, but kept growing, so I repotted it and then in December I noticed the green stem shooting up and now - voila!

Closeup!

Tales of the Lincoln White House

• Hell-cat

  

  Lincoln and two non-hell cats
  AI generated image
  
  

  
  
• Satan's daughter
• High-strung
• Demanding
• Impulsive
• Natural born thief
• Crazy
• Shrewish
• Termegant
• Hot-tempered
• Imperious
• Stingy
• Her Satanic Majesty

These are some of the many many unflattering things that people who knew Mary Lincoln had to say about her. 

The only unalloyed positive that most people could say about Mary was that she spurred Lincoln onto the presidency because she was even more ambitious than he was.

It didn't hurt that Lincoln sometimes slept in his office and worked in his office on Sundays to get away from his wife and her rages.

I think of the Trump presidency as the answer to the question "what if Mary Lincoln had been president instead of Abe?"

I've discovered a lot about the Lincoln White House since I started researching a play I'm working on about the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Recently I happened upon a book by historian Michael Burlingame called "An American Marriage: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd" and wow Burlingame spills all the tea about Mary Lincoln.

They really cleaned her up for the movie "Lincoln" - she is portrayed as merely a little arrogant and sort of snippy and she throws only one tantrum. She complains at the end of the movie that the only thing people will remember about her was that she was a crazy woman who made Lincoln miserable. Since she has been sanitized for our protection, there's a tendency to think that maybe she's been unfairly portrayed. 

But she was crazy and she did make Lincoln miserable.

Many have defended her by saying, well of course she was ill-tempered and inclined to self-indulgence, she suffered so much ill-fortune, with three sons and a husband dying on her.

But did ill-fortune make her hit people - including her husband - and turn into a thief?

 

In 1994 the Chicago Tribune ran an article called Marygate: Lincoln's Scandal:

The diary entries include details of (Owen Hickman ) Browning's conversations with Judge David Davis, who called Mrs. Lincoln "a natural born thief." She ran up astronomical bills for a $2,000 dress, furs and 300 pairs of kid gloves, and took things from the White House when she left, according to Davis, who acted as administrator of the Lincoln estate at one point.

"(S)tealing was a sort of insanity with her," Davis told Browning, according to a July 29, 1861, entry, made 14 years before Mrs. Lincoln was admitted for six months to a Batavia insane asylum.

I'm inclined to believe Burlingame about Mary Lincoln, although I did not appreciate some of the pop-psychology sections in the book.

In addition to info about Mary Lincoln, the Burlingame book mentions that Lincoln loved cats, and I followed up on that and found this article, 

President Abraham Lincoln “possessed extraordinary kindness of heart when his feelings could be reached,” wrote Treasury official Mansell B. Field in his memoirs. “He was fond of dumb animals, especially cats. I have seen him fondle one for an hour. 

This is also mentioned in the Burlingame book:

The president doted on the cats, which he named Tabby and Dixie, so much that he once fed Tabby from the table during a formal dinner at the White House.

When Lincoln’s embarrassed wife later observed that the action was “shameful in front of their guests,” the president replied, “If the gold fork was good enough for former President James Buchanan, I think it is good enough for Tabby.”

Mary - you knew this was coming - hated pets. Something else she has in common with Donald Trump.

David Blight on Trump and the "Lost Cause"

 

The return of the lonely New Year's Eve writer

This cover art from the New Yorker, from 1996, always spoke to me.

So I was excited to see that this year, twenty-eight years later, the New Yorker has another variation on the theme of lonely writer on New Year's Eve.

The first one is slightly less forlorn because the apparently hard-boiled dame in the foreground has a soulmate, a mug in an undershirt in the building across the street. Each taps away at their old-school typewriter.

Meanwhile the writer in 2024 has only a cat for a soulmate. And rather than a yellow incandescent light, she is lampless, seeing by the blue glow of her monitor. And rather than working on fiction, this year's writer appears to be toiling over a spreadsheet - something nobody outside of a certified accountant did back in 1996.

Both have those New York City apartment-style radiators though.

Murderbot's coming to a screen near you!

It was announced today:

It’s a big day for a certain Murderbot who just wants to watch its soaps. Apple TV+ has announced that it’s adapting Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series, with Alexander Skarsgård (True Blood, The Northman)  on board as executive producer and to star as the titular Murderbot.

 The scripts for the ten-episode season have already been written (before the writers’ strike, in fact), and production is set to start in just three months. Directors Chris and Paul Weitz (About a Boy, Mozart in the Jungle) are the creators of the show (as well as the writers, directors and producers via their banner Depth of Field) and also serve as executive producers. Other executive producers include David S. Goyer, the showrunner for Apple TV+’s Foundation series, Keith Levine from the company Phantom Four, and Andrew Miano for Depth of Field. Wells serves as a consulting producer.

Unfortunately they haven't announced when.

In other media-nerd news, I finally got my Monk movie. It was pretty good - the ending was heart-rending,  and I laughed aloud at "Neil Diamond" but some aspects were not-so-good. 

Oh well, that's show-biz.

My art is in the Brooklyn Museum

I attended two art schools: the Philadelphia College of Art (now called the University of the Arts) for a year on a scholarship, and I went to random classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts off and on between 1981 and 1988. Back then, before I switched to being a writer, I dreamed of one day having my artwork exhibited in a museum.

I never dreamed that it would happen via my Factsheet Five cover art.

Yesterday the Instagram account of someone associated with the Brooklyn Museum posted a photo from the new show at the Museum, called Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines.

How weird is that? My cover art for Factsheet Five #34 can be seen in the first column on the left, the third one down.

Here's my copy. It depicts a high school student getting detention for reading a copy of Factsheet Five behind her math book. I was long out of high school when I drew this, but I guess I still had those fond memories.

I couldn't find my original art for this picture - it was drawn in black and white and then I cut out the spot color areas on a translucent sheet with an x-acto knife .

I do have the original artwork for Factsheet Five #26, sans spot color treatment.

I was pretty influenced by Jaime Hernandez of "Love and Rockets" fame.

The guy who runs the Factsheet Five archive occasionally uses the color version of the punk's shirt as a kind of logo.

And here is my first Factsheet Five cover, which has no spot color, from issue #23. This cover doesn't get the attention that the other two get, although really I'm kind of surprised any of them have found favor, the style is rather less rough-hewn than most Factsheet Five art, which is usually the preferred level of hewn.

But what was that weird obsession I had with drawing really long chins?

In any case, I guess I'm going to the Brooklyn Museum now. It's been over ten years since I was there, I guess it's about time anyway.